Activism & Politics

A friend of mine read an immensely popular book that claims to disclose secrets about men every woman should know. As I listened to my friend divulge the book's "secrets," I could not help feeling that there isn't anything secret about its "secrets" and that it is little more than commonplace drivel about appeasing emotionally disturbed, controlling, and abusive males who just are not recognized as such.

I've been thinking about homosociality a bit these past few days. Homosociality (as explained so well in Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America) is the principle that all men, including heterosexual ones, are raised in our culture to be more eager to please other men than women. It doesn't take much in my classes to get heads nodding as the subject comes up!

Yes they can, argues NIGHAT GANDHI, because feminism is a philosophy and a movement for ending all forms of oppression, including that which is gender-based. In fact, gender-sensitive men should very much feel a part of this movement, she says.

“I’m sorry I make you feel like shit.”
“It’s just your privilege as a man.”
It’s 2:30am on a Sunday night, and while more words were spoken prior to those and after those, it’s those that tore me open. It was that brief exchange that broke through my walls of fake emotion and defense and allowed everything else to pour into me.

In December last year, local domestic violence committees in South West Sydney joined together to conduct a forum to tease out a variety of issues concerning men as victims that were being raised within their community. The forum was initiated by the committees’ as a way to highlight and discuss the key issues which include the acknowledgement of men as victims, establishing referral pathways and the importance of accurately reporting on research findings regarding prevalence. Stephen Fisher was one of nine panellists who participated on the day.

Why did I write this? I wrote this piece so that men struggling with patriarchy could know there are others in the same position, other men who are trying to wade through the personal and collective bullshit that we as men have been spouting (and ignoring) for so long. There are so many articles, zines, magazines and websites by and for women struggling against patriarchy, while men largely remain silent. With a few notable exceptions, most of the material I have found by men speaking out against patriarchy is extremely academic, using language that is completely un-accessible.

To what extent is it appropriate or possible for men who resist patriarchy to participate in the feminist movement?

Across the globe, there is growing interest in the question of boys’ and men’s roles in fostering gender equality. And men’s involvement in work towards gender equality is increasingly visible.

Why should we involve men in this work?

There are three broad reasons to involve men in our work towards gender equality.

... Parallel to having a society in which women are raised to be targets, we’re raising our men to target. Men chose to perpetrate sexual violence, at whatever form of sexual violence, because they live in a culture that teaches men lessons about who they are as men, how to act as men, how to treat women, how to “get” sex, and power. All men are part of these cultures and all men learn these same lessons. To some degree, all men are at some risk for perpetrating different forms of sexual violence. For some reasons that we don’t yet fully understand, some men choose to actually perpetrate sexual violence, while others don’t. Some of these lessons include teaching men that they should be the initiators/aggressors in terms of dating and sexual activity (and where is that line between initiating and aggressing?), teaching men that they have the right to have the final say in some aspects of our relationships, and the lessons that men are taught about women, power and sex.

Please see the attachment below, in Word.